Peter, I like the idea of being able to know what fees to expect from different
miners (it is like a service description / SLA for their service), but I would
prefer a more distributed discovery mechanism for the information on the fees
(Spent 10 years on Grid Computing...).
Miners could e.g. include a pointer to a webpage (or even their min fee) in the
coinbase (encoded properly, like the "/P2SH/" string for BIP0016). That way
clients could look it up them selves or you could create sites accumulating
this information from the chain it self.
So something like :
const char* service_sla =
"|https://my_ubercool_asic_mining_pool/sla.php|";
COINBASE_FLAGS << std::vector<unsigned char>(service_sla,
service_sla+strlen(service_sla));
The format of the sla.php page should then be specified too - but it could be a
json-rpc call returning a json object like (as result):
{
sla_version: "0.1",
accept_no_fee_tx: false,
min_fee: 50000,
big_tx_fee: 10000, // extra fee pr kb
}
I guess miners could work out a more suitable set of fees...
Seems like this calls for a BIP ?
/M
On 28/05/2012, at 16:54, Peter Vessenes wrote:
> One of the issues here though is that it would be nice if miners published
> their own tx rules -- it might be hard to impute them from data.
>
> I had started a thread about this on bitcoin.org some time ago, and I don't
> recall what the general outcome was.
>
> I had imagined an open service whereby a miner could publish a short string
> in their conbase tying to the service and the service would have different
> metadata, including the miner's transaction guarantees.
>
> We offered to host this before, and would still be willing to host such a
> service.
>
> Peter
>
> On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 7:52 AM, Stefan Thomas <m...@justmoon.de> wrote:
> Zooko is spot on - slower confirmations will give people a reason to set
> higher fees. As soon as fees reach a level where they matter, even
> botnet operators will be looking into ways of including transactions for
> some extra profit.
>
> In the meantime slightly slower confirmations aren't a problem. Consider
> that even if it takes four blocks to get your transaction included
> instead of one, once it is included, you still benefit from every new
> block in terms of security. So if you're looking for six confirmations
> for example, even a three block delay will only be a 50% delay for you.
> And of course there are techniques for instant transactions which
> continue to be refined and improved.
>
> As for the proposed solutions: Punishing 1-tx blocks is complete and
> utter nonsense. It's trivial to include a bogus second transaction.
>
> Any additional challenges towards miners like hashes of the previous
> block are at best useless. If I was running a botnet, I'd just grab that
> hash from a website (pretty good chance Blockchain.info will have it :P)
> or mining pool or wherever and keep going undeterred. At worst they may
> affect scalability one day. You might imagine a peer-to-peer network of
> miners who for cost reasons don't download all blocks anymore, but
> verify only a percentage of them at random. They might then exchange
> messages about invalid blocks including a proof (invalid tx, merkle
> branch) why the block is invalid. This is just one idea, the point is
> that assumptions about what a legitimate miner looks like may not always
> hold in the future.
>
> Finally, there is an ethical aspect as well. If a miner wishes not to
> include my transaction that is his choice. He has no more an obligation
> to sell his service to me than I have to buy it from him. If I really,
> really want him to include my transaction I will have to offer to pay more.
>
> If we as developers think that confirmations are too slow or that more
> blocks should include transactions, then the right measures would be:
>
> - Educating users about the relationship between confirmation speed and fees
> - Raising the default transaction fee
>
> Every market has a supply curve, so it is economically to be expected
> that there will be some miners who don't include transactions, simply
> because they are at that end of the supply curve where it is not worth
> it for them to sell their service. All markets must have a certain
> tension - there must be miners who don't include transactions for there
> to be users who want their transactions included more quickly. In other
> words there must be somebody not confirming if confirmations are to have
> value. If you interfere with that all you'll accomplish is keep
> transaction fees below market level, which will make the transition from
> inflation-financed hashing to transaction-financed hashing more painful
> and disruptive.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Stefan
>
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>
> Peter J. Vessenes
> CEO, CoinLab
> M: 206.595.9839
> Skype: vessenes
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